After Postmemory: Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s MUTTERSPRACHE MAMELOSCHN and the Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors in Germany

• In Event: Scraps of Memory: The Literature of Third-Generation Holocaust Survivors in Germany

Abstract

In this paper, I outline my second book project on the intergenerational memory of third-generation Holocaust survivors in contemporary Germany. Expanding on Marianne Hirsch’s personal treatment of intergenerational trauma in THE GENERATION OF POSTMEMORY (2012), I plan to develop a linguistic hybrid approach. I aim to combine autobiographical reflection on my own experiences as a member of the third generation growing up in Germany with scholarly analysis of literary texts by Jewish authors of the same generation.

As a case study, I focus on Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s MUTTERSPRACHE MAMELOSCHN––a drama that brings together three generations with very different relationships to the Holocaust, Judaism, and Germany. In quick-witted dialogues, the drama reveals tensions between Holocaust survivor and staunch communist Lin, daughter Clara, and granddaughter Rahel. Clara, who grew up in the void of her mother’s Holocaust trauma, identifies with German language and society while distancing herself from Judaism. Her daughter Rahel, however, has a close bond with her grandmother, wants to learn Yiddish, and, like her brother Davie, who attends rabbinical school in Israel, moves away from Germany to study in Jewish New York.

The drama reflects the current state of research on third-generation Holocaust survivors as well as my personal experiences in an aesthetic form. While the second generation, Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger write in THIRD-GENERATION HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION: TRAUMA, HISTORY, AND MEMORY, was constrained by their parents’ incomplete or nonexistent accounts, the third generation has enough distance to ask difficult questions and piece together their grandparents’ fragmented narratives. As the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling and many never had the opportunity to ask their grandparents directly, the third generation’s efforts to come to terms with the past require a certain fictionality. This fictionality, which abstracts from the collective experience of an entire generation, can be traced, as my paper shows, in literary works such as MUTTERSPRACHE MAMELOSCHN.

Author

• Leonie Ettinger